


Master and Commander

by Elendiliel



Series: Lightning Strikes [14]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Planet Tatooine (Star Wars), Pre-Battle of Yavin (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 04:08:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29183043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendiliel/pseuds/Elendiliel
Summary: On a supply run to Tatooine, stocking up for a big mission for the Rebel Alliance, the leader of Lightning Squadron and teacher of Thunder Squadron finds the past catching up with her - in a very good way.
Series: Lightning Strikes [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2087898
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Master and Commander

**Author's Note:**

> This leads in to "Out of the Shadows", Part 12 of _Lightning Strikes_ , and is therefore also set in 1 BBY. Neither is necessary to understand the other, though.
> 
> This sub-series is for all my Rebel Alliance and Rebellion-adjacent stories, in chronological order. _Lightning Strikes_ is still my main series for Lightning Squadron's shenanigans, in the order in which they command my attention.
> 
> Again, this is just here for completeness. I've had the central image in my head for weeks and needed to wrap some kind of story around it.

_All perishing hyperspace routes lead through perishing Tatooine, and right now I perishing well wish they didn’t_ , thought Hel. She was in a cantina in Mos Eisley, trying to attract only the right sort of attention. That was one upside to being close to forty – less chance of attracting one of the wrong sorts of attention, especially when she’d chosen a good-looking face. The one she was wearing just then, courtesy of carefully applied cosmetics and the lessons her friend Suu Lawquane had taught her so many years before, was plain and nondescript, framed by straight light brown hair, with eyes to match. It was a useful face, but she’d worn it on a few planets now and was considering changing it soon. Maybe to something more striking.

She was waiting for the rest of her family to return from various foraging and reconnaissance expeditions. They needed to restock pretty much all their consumable equipment and find new transport for an upcoming mission. Taking down a weapons factory was no small task, even for seven Jedi and two clones, particularly as the Jedi couldn’t use their sabres openly. Hel’s was built into the shieldstaff she now always carried, its kyber crystal powering the staff’s forcefield. It was better than nothing, but denying her gifts like that still didn’t sit well with her.

The results of her own hunt were in her old pack, still somehow in one piece, one strap wound firmly around her leg to make any thief’s life more difficult. Ration bars, ammunition and the various paints and powders she and some other members of her teams used to alter their appearances. They had been easy to find; she, Fives and Spark had known Mos Eisley well ever since their flight from the Republic in the immediate aftermath of Order 66. The other two core members of Lightning Squadron were also scouting for charge packs for their blasters, droid poppers and the like, and keeping their ears open for pertinent or otherwise helpful information at the same time, which was presumably what was keeping them. The sabotage (Petro and Gungi) and data-retrieval (Katooni and Zatt) units were after more specialised gear, which would take longer to obtain, and the pilots, Ganodi and Byph, had the hardest job of all. Finding a way to reach their target, and a couple of starfighters for when they did.

Unlike some rebel cells, Lightning and Thunder Squadrons didn’t have a single base, mobile or otherwise. Now that Hel’s apprentices were grown up, they were effectively their own independent unit, and carried out their own missions, although as their master Hel was still responsible for them, and had some measure of authority as well. It wasn’t an arrangement conducive to having a fixed abode, or a starship they could call home. They relied on hitching lifts, public shuttles and occasionally second- or third-hand transports that usually needed substantial work, and rarely lasted long. Their latest such temporary base had gone beyond even their ability to repair it on arrival on Tatooine, and they’d need another. Hel had no intention of asking for a lift to an Imperial arms manufacturer, especially one involved with allegedly top-secret projects. She wondered what Ganodi and Byph would find. They had a gift for taking on broken-down wrecks and coaxing a few more missions out of them.

Hel was so busy with her thoughts and speculations that she only just noticed the man in the brown cloak who sat down next to her. There wasn’t much space in the cantina, so she didn’t blame him for not asking permission. She had him down as a semi-local man who had come in to one of Tatooine’s few major settlements on a supply run, like hers but with more peaceful intent, until a voice she hadn’t heard in nearly two decades asked, “Young Abbasa, isn’t it?”

“Nobody’s called me that in a long time.” Hel wasted only a fraction of a second cursing herself for not paying attention. Now that she was focused on the man, she realised that she should have sensed him the moment he came in. His Force-presence was so strong, yet so gentle, and _so_ familiar even to someone who had only been on the fringes of the major events of the Clone Wars, the quiet apprentice of a relatively undistinguished master, then commander of a strike team, away from home for weeks at a time. He could well have learned to cloak his presence from unfriendly sensitives, she thought, trying to jettison her self-directed annoyance. She wouldn’t have been surprised at _anything_ this particular Jedi got up to. “Master Kenobi.”

“Likewise. And in your case, I can see why.” It wasn’t just the eighteen standard years, or even the makeup, that had aged her, turning Jedi Knight Helli Abbasa, youngest general in the Grand Army of the Republic, into pure Hel of Lightning Squadron. It was the war, and its ending. She’d known that Obi-Wan Kenobi had survived the first devastating wave of attacks on the Order – Torrent, Lightning Squadron’s man on the inside, had heard it early on from Commander Cody, Kenobi’s second-in-command and didn’t-want-to-be assassin – but hadn’t heard anything since, other than conflicting rumours. Now she knew which ones were nearer the truth.

His comment hadn’t been remotely insulting, just his automatic sharp wit and sassiness, only slightly blunted by age. She acknowledged that with a slight tilt of the glass she’d just picked up. He carried on as she took a sip of the cantina’s only palatable non-alcoholic drink. “What are you doing here?”

“Restocking for a mission.” She explained briefly and quietly, in very general terms, about their errand. Kenobi seemed less interested in that than in her brothers and apprentices, but politely waited for her to finish and ask him a question in return. “Why are _you_ here? I’d have expected you to be out fighting or talking sense into people.”

“I’m needed here. There’s – someone I have to protect.” He’d lowered his voice even further, despite the fact that no-one was paying them any attention, and the ambient noise that made even normal conversation a struggle.

“Someone I know?” Helli wasn’t sure where the question had come from.

“No. But you’d know who he was if you saw him.”

“Is this anything to do with Anakin?” Kenobi and his former padawan had once been inseparable. Helli didn’t know what had happened to Anakin Skywalker after Order 66. No one she knew did, not even his apprentice, Ahsoka Tano. Nothing good, she had a feeling.

“His son.” The words were almost inaudible.

“Anakin had a _son_? Who-?” She had been going to ask who the boy’s mother was, but memory blotted out the words. A visit to the Senate building, looking for Anakin, on an errand very similar to Ganodi and Byph’s. Lingering looks as he moved away from the Senator for Naboo. She remembered sympathising with him over the requirements of the Code, thinking that he and the Senator were in a similar position to her and Torrent. Now she realised how catastrophically she had misread the situation. “Senator Amidala?” Kenobi nodded slightly.

“Skies above! I see why you have to protect him – though if he’s too much like his parents, _he_ won’t be the one that needs protecting.” Anakin’s reputation for foolhardy courage was both substantial and well-founded, and Senator Amidala was said to be equally fearless when her duty called. Kenobi’s wry smile told her she had a point.

“I assume I can rely on you to keep this a secret?” It was her turn to nod. If the Emperor found out that a child of the most powerful Jedi in the Order still lived, that would not be the case for long. “To change the subject, just how _did_ you end up working with a pair of clones, and having half a dozen apprentices?”

This was safer ground, though not by much. Palpatine had made one attempt on Fives’ life already, as well as Order 66. But Fives’ knowledge of the clones’ control chips had long since ceased to be relevant, and one middle-ranking Jedi Knight and a handful of apprentices she had trained alone and on the run were hardly something anyone in the cantina was likely to report to the Empire, which was highly unpopular on Tatooine. Even so, she kept her voice low as she explained about Fives’ survival and retrieval (he had probably already guessed a lot of that), the removal of their brothers’ chips, the way they had sidestepped the assassination order and faked their deaths, and their meeting with the then-younglings on Onderon. Again, Kenobi waited until she had finished before commenting.

“It’s certainly an unconventional arrangement, but I wouldn’t have expected anything else from you.” She acknowledged the backhanded compliment with a wry smile of her own. While Helli still lived by the Jedi Code, she had always done so on her own terms, in her own fashion. “And I suppose there was no way of going through official channels. Have you given any thought to when their apprenticeships will end – if they ever do?”

“Not really. It’s hard to think beyond the next mission most of the time. They’ve been old enough for the final trials for years, and ready for longer, I think. But I don’t have the authority to make that call. I probably shouldn’t have taken them on in the first place, but it felt like the right thing to do.”

“Then it most likely was. As a member of the Jedi Council, such as it now is, I can approve your decision retrospectively, in view of the extraordinary circumstances. I remember those younglings; you and they certainly suit each other. As for their trials – when this war is over, if we all survive, come and find me. If that is not possible, seek out Master Yoda. He will be able to advise you better than I can.”

“Will do, Master. Thank you.” It was so easy to slip back into the role of a young knight addressing a senior master, and forget that she was now herself a seasoned veteran and teacher. That state lasted until she saw Ganodi and Byph struggling through the cantina’s crowd of patrons, and waved to them. By the time her excited padawans had made their way to her table, justly proud of themselves for securing a fast shuttle and two Delta-7B Aethersprite starfighters with accompanying droids for less than their budget, Kenobi had gone. Hel decided not to tell her apprentices about their meeting. The fewer people who knew Kenobi’s secret, the better. She trusted her family implicitly, but she also trusted the Empire to be utterly ruthless in obtaining information like this. Kenobi’s survival, and the existence of Anakin’s son, would remain strictly between the master and the commander.

**Author's Note:**

> I realise I've now posted two action-free stories in a row. The next one will rebalance that situation.


End file.
